No, the GOP and the Dems Haven’t Actually Swapped Brains

Even after the lunacy of the past four years, the GOP’s recent behavior is jaw-dropping, an extraordinary transformation that feels like the Republican Party has experienced some sort of bizarre brain swap.

After years as the pro-business party, Republicans have formed an anti-corporate chorus. Republicans who only recently railed about “cancel culture,” now loudly demand the cancellation of critics, opponents and politically incorrect foes. The GOP’s enemies list now ranges from Major League Baseball, to Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, JPMorgan Chase, ViacomCBS, Citigroup, Cisco, UPS and Merck, not to mention state election officials who refused to help Donald Trump overturn the election, and the handful of sitting Republicans who had the temerity to vote to impeach him.

During the Trump era, we’ve already seen how Republicans who once embraced free trade are now committed protectionists. The party that insisted that “character matters” in the 1990s, decided that nothing mattered after Trump came along. Republicans cared deeply about deficits and debts ... until they lost interest. A party that prided itself on its patriotism has made its peace with a seditious insurrection, and now finds itself attacking the national pastime.

It’s a head-shaking display of ideological malleability that seems like a rejection of every principle that conservatives held dear. The reality is that the GOP’s working-class war against corporate America is neither a war, nor working class, nor especially anti-corporate. Like almost everything else in Republican politics these days, the GOP-corporate slap fight is more performative than substantive. And everyone involved knows it.

For decades, Republicans claimed to believe in local control and the right of private businesses to make their own decisions. But now, activist GOP governors like Ron DeSantis of Florida and Greg Abbott of Texas are signing executive orders barring businesses from requiring “vaccination passports.”

Conservatives who once claimed they favored limited government, now push an ambitious array of state mandates and interventions. Senators like Josh Hawley have called for the creation of new bureaucracies to audit and monitor speech on social media platforms. “Constitutional conservatives” like Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee threaten to use government power to retaliate against private organizations for their political speech.

And until about five minutes ago, GOP Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was the Senate’s chief defender of the free speech rights of corporate America. Back in 2012, when Democrats pressed for more transparency in corporate political spending, McConnell declared: “It is critically important for all conservatives — and indeed all Americans — to stand up and unite in defense of the freedom to organize around the causes we believe in, and against any effort that would constrain our ability to do so.”

But last week, after the CEOs of major companies spoke out against Georgia’s voter suppression laws, he declared: “My advice to the corporate CEOs of America is to stay out of politics. Don’t pick sides in these big fights.” And he matched that with a threat: “Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order.”

But worry not. Mitch will continue to cash the corporate campaign checks. And there will be no “serious consequences,” at least not on his watch.

Despite all the fustian about retaliation and calls for boycotts, not a single Republican will vote for a cent in new corporate taxes. And the newly minted party of the working man will still be a reliable ally of corporate interests. Mitch McConnell is not Abbie Hoffman and the GOP is not taking its cues from Bernie Sanders.

So why the elaborate pantomime? The show serves a useful political purpose for Republicans, who face an obvious problem. For years, the GOP has been a loyal handmaiden to corporate interests, reliably delivering juicy tax breaks, subsidies and favors to their equally reliable corporate funders.

Trump’s success with blue-collar MAGA voters has meant the party now feels it has to square its corporate toadyism with its new faux-populism.

This is awkward, because a “working-class” GOP has no interest in actually doing much of anything for the working class. It is unlikely to support significant increases in the minimum wage, more job training, paid leave, greater access to health care, labor rights or the creation of more blue-collar jobs through a major infrastructure bill.

Instead, when Republicans talk about the working class, they mean cultural warfare, racial anxiety and grievance against elites. In other words, more Dr. Seuss than economic uplift. Conveniently, the recent stirring of corporate conscience about issues of race and democracy has allowed the GOP to combine its faux class war with its assault on wokeness.

So when wannabe Working Class Hero Marco Rubio endorsed a union campaign by Amazon workers, he explained it this way: “Here’s my standard: When the conflict is between working Americans and a company whose leadership has decided to wage culture war against working-class values, the choice is easy — I support the workers.”

In other words, Rubio was supporting collective bargaining merely as payback against a company owned by Jeff Bezos — someone who Trump loathes. It wasn’t about class. It was always about culture and making the right enemies.

There is no legislative agenda here, only a new form of highly theatrical posturing that has replaced what was left of substantive conservatism in the GOP. Under Trump, the Republican Party literally decided that it did not need to have a platform; and even after Trump’s departure, it doesn’t think it needs an actual agenda, or indeed fixed principles of any kind.

The current GOP is less interested in the messy business of governing than it is in performative indignation and the memes that play well in social media and on cable television. Memes, it shouldn’t need to be said, are not ideas and don’t require a consistent set of principles. The result is a kind of free-floating nihilism, as the GOP chases narratives that stir outrage, generate clicks, shake loose grassroots contributions, and play well on Newsmax and Fox.

Trump understands that. So does Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (she had a $3.2-million first-quarter, off-year fundraising haul) and other rising stars of the performative GOP. Rep. Matt Gaetz was widely mocked for writing that “If you aren’t making news, you aren’t governing.” But he had accurately identified the actual power structure of right-wing politics, and the reason that the entertainment wing has overthrown the party’s one-time establishment.

But this lack of principle conceals a far more consistent thread among Republicans. They continue to be united in their commitment to servicing Trump’s ego, making it harder to vote and winning at all costs.

Increasingly, however, there are voices on the right calling for the abandonment of values like restraint, moderation, or concerns for procedural niceties like the peaceful transfer of power. And this is where the performance veers from absurdist comedy to something much darker. Having abandoned both principles and traditional conservative sensibilities, some of the right seem ready to abandon the very idea of America. In a recent edition of the Claremont Institute’s journal, The American Mind, one right-wing writer argued that anyone who voted against Trump in the last election is not a real American. “I don’t just mean the millions of illegal immigrants,” he wrote. He meant Americans who “may technically be citizens of the United States but are no longer (if they ever were) Americans.”

And then this leading conservative magazine effectively excommunicated the more than 81 million people who voted for Joe Biden: “They do not believe in, live by, or even like the principles, traditions, and ideals that until recently defined America as a nation and as a people. It is not obvious what we should call these citizen-aliens, these non-American Americans; but they are something else.”

For the moment, this may all be theater. But fake wars can become real ones. As we saw on January 6, pretend insurrections can turn violent and deadly.

Conservatives used to understand that words had meaning, and actions had consequences. Even when they think they are just playacting.